In this issue

ASM aims to give our members maximum value for their membership. Some new initiatives for 2018 include an annual teacher’s travel award, valued at $4000, to attend the American Society for Microbiology Conference for Undergraduate Educators (AMSCUE), which is the world’s premier microbiology teachers’ conference. We also have instituted 100 travel awards, each valued at $200, to make it easier for members within 10 years of attaining their highest qualification to attend our Annual Scientific Meeting.

The March 2015 issue of Microbiology Australia was devoted to ‘Mammalian microbiomes’ and this March 2018 issue on ‘Environmental microbiomes’ complements that previous one. Additionally, authors of articles in the current issue were largely chosen from oral presenters at the inaugural ASM-sponsored Australian Microbial Ecology (AUSME2017) conference held a year ago in Melbourne. That 3-day conference in February 2017 celebrated the field of Microbial Ecology.

For centuries, ecologists have used biogeographic patterns to test the processes governing the assembly and maintenance of plant and animal communities. Similarly, evolutionary biologists have used historical biogeography (e.g. phylogeography) to understand the importance of geological events as barriers to dispersal that shape species distributions. As the field of microbial biogeography initially developed, the utilisation of highly conserved marker genes, such as the 16S ribosomal RNA gene, stimulated investigations into the biogeographic pa...

Marine viruses are the largest, but most poorly explored genetic reservoir on the planet. They occur ubiquitously in the ocean at an average density of 5–15 × 106 viruses per mL of seawater, which represents abundances an order of magnitude higher than those of bacteria. While viruses are known agents of a number of diseases in the marine environment, little is known about their beneficial function to corals. Herein, we briefly introduce the topic of viruses as potential drivers of coral bleaching and disease.

Like many organisms, bacteria regularly inhabit environments characterised by spatiotemporal heterogeneity in the availability of resources required for growth and energy generation, meaning they must either tune their metabolism to prevailing conditions or have the capacity to migrate to favourable microenvironments1. To achieve the latter, bacteria measure their resource landscape and suitably direct their locomotion using a behaviour called chemotaxis, which is the ability to guide movement up or down chemical gra...

Farming systems are under pressure to sustainably increase productivity to meet demand for food and fibre for a growing global population under shrinking arable lands and changing climatic conditions. Furthermore, conventional farming has led to declines in soil fertility and, in some cases, inappropriate and excessive use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides has caused soil degradation, negatively impacting human and environmental health. The soil and plant microbiomes are significant determinants of plant fitness and productivity. Microbes ...

The soil microbiome, including bacteria, archaea, fungi, viruses, and other microbial eukaryotes, has crucial roles in the biogeochemical cycling of nitrogen (N), the maintenance of soil fertility, and the plant N use efficiency (NUE) in agro-ecosystems1. Recent advances in omics-based technologies (e.g. metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and metaproteomics) have expanded our understanding of the soil microbiome and their controls on specific N-cycling processes1–3. Given the growing N-based fe...

Many of the world's most arid deserts harbour surprisingly diverse communities of heterotrophic bacteria. These organisms persist in surface soils under extreme climatic conditions, despite lacking obvious energy inputs from phototrophic primary producers. A longstanding conundrum has been how these communities sustain enough energy to maintain their diversity and biomass. We recently helped to resolve this conundrum by demonstrating that some desert communities are structured by a minimalistic mode of chemosynthetic primary production, where a...

The Burrup Peninsula in north-west Western Australia is home to one of the most substantial collections of rock engravings, or petroglyphs, in the world. These petroglyphs are carved through the dark coloured patina, commonly referred to as rock varnish, into the weathering rind of the local parent rock. Rock varnish is essentially a thin layer of manganese (Mn) and iron (Fe) oxides and hydroxides with embedded clay minerals, the formation of which is relatively poorly understood. It is generally considered to be a hostile environment for micro...

As the global population increases, so does the demand for minerals and energy resources. Demand for some of the major global commodities is currently growing at rates of: copper – 1.6% p.a.1; iron ore: 1.4% p.a.2; aluminium – 5% p.a.3; rare earth elements – 7% p.a.4, driven not only by population growth in China, India, and Africa, but also by increasing urbanisation and industrialisation globally. Technological advances in renewable energy production and storage, construction ma...

Microorganisms make a significant contribution to reef ecosystem health and resilience via their critical role in mediating nutrient transformations, their interactions with macro-organisms and their provision of chemical cues that underpin the recruitment of diverse reef taxa. However, environmental changes often cause compositional and functional shifts in microbial communities that can have flow-on consequences for microbial-mediated processes. These microbial alterations may impact the health of specific host organisms and can have repercus...

Whilst bioleaching is primarily used to recover minerals from low-grade ores, the increasing demand for Rare Earth elements combined with supply chain concerns is opening up new avenues of extraction from mine tailings, waste products and recyclable materials. Exploration of new, novel and economically viable techniques are required to manage the coming shortage and volatility of global markets with more environmentally sound alternatives to traditional mining operations holding the key.

Ecology is the study of the interactions amongst organisms and their environment1. In microbial ecology, a major goal is to understand how environmental microbiomes impact ecosystem health and function. This desire to mechanistically link micro and macro processes is increasingly highlighting the importance of functional ecology, which aims to develop an understanding of relationships using functional traits, as opposed to species names. A functional trait may be any morphological or physiological trait that influences the performanc...

Recently, the role of the plant-associated mycobiome (i.e. the fungal community) in influencing the competitive success of invasive plant species has received increasing attention. Fungi act as primary drivers of the plant invasion process due to their ability to form both beneficial and detrimental relationships with terrestrial plant species. Here we review the role of the plant mycobiome in promoting or inhibiting plant species invasion into foreign ecosystems. Moreover, the potential to exploit these relationships for invasive plant control...